Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

Wow, do not take this advice. This must have been written by someone with little to no skin in the game. I'm honestly surprised someone would post this.

The idea that a good product will sell itself is a developer's fantasy. Trust me, I've been there and learned the hard way. Once I realized that sales and marketing were the missing pieces, I began to build revenue and I'm well past my first 1M. It only came after I made that change.

Every startup should focus on its inbound and outbound strategies.

Inbound Marketing: Publish great content (blog posts, white papers, videos, resources, things people will find genuinely useful) on your site and across the web on topics related to your service so that users find you. Put the most compelling resources behind a lead form that helps you qualify them as potential buyers. This gets the user acquainted with you and also gives you their contact info for follow up marketing or sales contacts.

Outbound Sales: Reaching out directly to the leads you have acquired (best quality) or off some other list (lower, variable quality). Sometimes the contact will be happy to engage and learn more. Other times not.

You can and will win sales from the inbound piece alone, especially if you have a clear and efficient sign up process. But you'll find you can greatly amplify the number of closed sales by reaching out to users and engaging them directly. That human touch adds a whole new element.

There are many facets of sales and merketing but I wanted to lay out the most important items, since taking the post's advice will almost definitely point you in the wrong direction.

Cannot agree more - I really don't understand the argument the post is trying to make.

At some point, you are doing sales, and you are doing marketing. Heck, even talking to a mate at another company and pitching them on what you're building falls under them.

If you're not thinking about distribution (even, and I wouldn't recommend it, as a sideline item), you're going to be essentially dead in the water.

The article calls out Facebook and Slack as examples of "Product-led Growth" as somehow serperate from Sales and Marketing. I think that's perhaps misrepresenting how their growth worked. Facebook didn't grow because it was just a very good social network that was better than competitors through sheer value, but its marketing and acquisition funnels were baked into the product (friends asking friends to join - some would see that as a product feature, some would see it as an engineered marketing feature).

The Tesla example is just a weird one - once again falling into the common trap of equating advertising with all marketing. You think Tesla wouldn't have spent on advertising had they not had one of the most PR-able men in the world at the helm?

We’ve got to 2M YRR with pretty much no sales and no marketing. We do talk to customers but only when they initiate contact. We’re B2B though and the value we provide can be easily communicated in five words.

Go on...

Basically we built a product that didn’t exist, but knew our industry would want, so people started talking about us as they found out. And those people really wanted us to succeed which turned into early sales which allowed us to fund development of the product.

We didn’t spend many resources on sales or marketing because we knew those resources would be better spent on making a better product. For example I spent a weekend making a static single page website a few years ago but I’ve not logged into our google analytics account in at least over a year. Inquiries come in through the website regularly still.

I think we’re pretty close to product/market fit now, so we should get a much better return on sales/marketing efforts than we would have a couple years ago.

I guess you could say that we knew the product wasn’t good enough for the majority of our market but it was good enough for the early adopters who really needed it, and we did just enough to make sure those people could find us. I spent months of my life working with those early adopters to make sure they didn’t regret their choice, and that helped guide the development of the product as well as maintain goodwill in the community, which led to more word of mouth sales.

Anyway take my story with a grain of salt because we’re not successful yet.

Absolutely spot on. I made the mistake mentioned in this blog post earlier and I wish I had focused on inbound and outbound marketing earlier.

"Building a Great Product" is the number one reason startups fail. There is nothing wrong with building a great product. However, if no one wants to buy your great product or if it costs a ton of money to get people's attention for long enough for them to understand how great your product is, then you will not be profitable.

I guess this is just semantics but can you really say a product is great if no one wants to buy it and it doesn't get people's attention?

If you look at product ratings you'll see that there are some products which get great ratings but those companies are not successful long term financially, and other products which get medium reviews but come from companies which are very profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com